Frances Dinkelspiel 's new book about wine and murder is out

Frances Dinkelspiel is back with a new book. When she announced that the book will be titled Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California, she decided that she will keep her own connection to the California wine industry distant from it. But as she started writing the book, she realized that she had two extremely interesting stories to tell. First was a modern crime story that was based on a 2005 arson fire which destroyed millions of bottles of wine. These bottles included 175 bottles of dessert wine made by Frances Dinkelspiel’s great-great-grandfather, Isaias Hellman. The other story was a general history of the state’s wine industry.

While writing the story, she realized that the narration of this straightforward agricultural history was not intriguing. She also felt the narration of her personal connection would make the entire story more compelling. She then decided that those burned bottles would be used as a prism to write about the history. She incorporated the two stories and made them one.

The 175 bottles of port and angelica wine were produced in 1875 by Hellman in Rancho Cucamonga, which is one of the oldest vineyards in the state. By 2005, every bottle kept there must have been worth of $450. The entire state was a part of an inheritance that belonged to Dinkelspiel’s cousin, Miranda Heller. The complete collection was entrusted to a wine storage facility in Vallejo for safekeeping, but a devastatingly destructive fire broke out in 2005 that destroyed 4 to 5 million wine bottles. The entire collection would have been equivalent to $250 million, all of which was burned and went up in the flames.

Dinkelspiel, who is an award-winning journalist, decided to dig into the story more. She went through Berkeley’s resident 2010 book, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California. This told her how Hellman was responsible for shaping a lot of how California stands today. This includes the banking system, the railroads, universities, real estate development, agriculture, oil, water, and most importantly, wine. Through these major interrelated facets, Hellman’s impact on the stage was extremely huge. His story is inspiring and has a lot to tell. People deserve to know the entire history.

Isaias Hellman emigrated from Bavaria in 1859. At that time, there were absolutely no roads between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Also, telegraph didn’t exist back then. The book also tells how Hellman became a part of the wine industry and what made him so big. Dinkelspiel believes that at first, Hellman saw it as a new investment opportunity and later on developed it further. The book also covers how Hellman wanted to break out of the burden of being a Jewish man, but the book is not about the Jewish evolution. Rather, it is more about Hellman’s influential story.

Dinkelspiel believes that it was an article which required her to cover the story about the fire that influenced her to write the book.